Markus Schulz and The Guvernment Nightclub in Toronto announced in early April that Markus was finally booked to be playing his first ever solo marathon set at the club that was recently ranked at #22 by Dj Mag in their Top 100 list.
There’s more to the story than just a simple booking though. The story involves Markus saying that he’d love an opportunity like this, an online petition asking for it and a lot of tweets and Facebook posts asking the club for it. If you read enough tweets or posts on Facebook from fans to their favorite dj’s asking for a gig the common response will be, “ask your local club or promoter to make it happen.” That’s exactly what happened here and here’s how it happened.
Markus has played short sets and even as long as 6 hours at The Guvernment in the past but he has never gone the distance with a true open to close that a handful of other cities around the world have experienced. His last appearance at the club was for Labour of Love in September 2012 when he played for four and a half hours ending his set at 8am which is what really set all of this in motion. You can read my review of that set here.
His set from that event in Toronto was the Global DJ Broadcast World Tour edition that aired on September 13, 2012.
The Guvernment in Toronto was also chose for the 2009 city compilation based on his six hour set that year.
During that Sept 13, 2012 edition broadcast a question by Tim Gonzalez was brought up to Markus asking him about playing the deeper tracks he’s been known to play and Markus responded, “That is exactly the reason why they need me to play open to close. I can’t start off deep in the middle of a night after 2 or 3 DJs have been banging it out before me.”
“I could have ended it at 5, and would have been the wise decision after barely any sleep from NY the night before and playing in Montreal during the day,” Markus Schulz had said during a GDJB chat. “But I try my best to make the fans’ experience as best as possible.”
A lot of us had asked him more about this happening and Markus Schulz continued to say, “I would absolutely love if the Guv gave me that room or Koolhaus to play open to close. Might be worth you guys encouraging them.”
After I had read that I thought it was time to try and gather support for such a thing and get the attention of The Guvernment. One way to get attention was to start an online petition that gathered 398 signatures during the whole process. Not a lot of signatures but it created some buzz every week and sent emails to the club every time that someone signed off. This was spread every Thursday for months.
Was anyone listening to the constant emails? The tweets? The Facebook posts? They noticed.
In early March Markus had said that he knew talks had started with The Guvernment which was a great sign and that sometime towards summer was a possibility. And then things went silent. Just before the Winter Music Conference in Miami the latest word that was shared was that there were whispers but nothing else. It was time for WMC, Ultra Music Festival, Space in Miami, a lot of media, meetings, panels and of course the New World Punx events at A State of Trance 600 New York City and Bal en Blanc. In hindsight, I think that was his way of calming the buzz prior to those large events.
Fast forward to the April 4, 2013 edition of Global DJ Broadcast when this conversation took place:
The Guvernment had retweeted it which meant something was up.
Fast forward about two hours and the news was unleashed!
The rest is history! If you’ve never been to the club before you can expect the typical large room with big lights, big sound and lasers that will send everyone deep into the rabbit hole late in the night. The venue is 19+ and the crowd will range from those just turning of age to those over 40 that have been dancing until dawn in Toronto since the early 90’s. The club will likely be packed early in the night but only the strong will survive beyond 3:00 AM. Will you be one of them?
For more information about the club visit http://theguvernment.com/ and to purchase tickets click here http://inktickets.com/show.cfm?id=97828&key=o03R7MKVGT.
